Introduction: truth and literature
The layered contents of mimesis
Between nothingness and ideas: the mimetic discontinuity
Narrative and existential analytics
Two: The origin of the novel
Symbolic thresholds: 1550
Symbolic thresholds: 1670
The territory of the romance
The territory of the novel
Three: The novel and the literature of the ancien regime
The dialectic of continuity and change
Classicism and the separation of styles
Moralistic apparatuses, poetic justice, and exemplary heroes
The legitimization of the romance
The legitimization of the novel
Four: The book of particular life
Suspense, entrelacement, and the romanesque
The story of private lives
National differences: France and England
Five: The birth of the modern novel
Freedom from rules of style
Freedom from the allegory and morality
Moralism, empathy, and observation
The expansion of the narratable world
The middle station of life
The serious mimesis of everyday life
Six; The nineteenth-century paradigm
The frameworks of the nineteenth-century paradigm
The figurative novel and its theatrical model
The discovery of the environment
The significance of the melodramatic novel
The romance in the novel, special characters
The novel of personal destinies
A map of the nineteenth-century paradigm
Seven: The transition to modernism
The second phase of nineteenth-century realism
Realism without melodrama
Modern forms of the romance
The sense of a transformation
Eight: On contemporary fiction
Conclusion: A theory of the novel
The genre of particularity
Relativism and prospectivism
An analytics of existence
Discursive transformations
On the present state of things.
